Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of December 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of December 31, 2012

(Financial information is only available for December 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2012.

Revenue

$30,916,665

Expenses:

Engineering Group

$6,289,609

Fundraising Group

$2,039,275

Grantmaking & Programs Group

$2,390,621

Governance Group

$364,699

Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group

$1,557,154

Finance/HR/Admin Group

$2,820,212

Total Expenses

$15,461,570

Total surplus/(loss)

$15,455,095

Revenue for the month of December is $14.30MM vs plan of $14.41MM, approximately $109K or 1% under plan.

Year-to-date revenue is $30.92MM vs plan of $29.91MM, approximately $1.01MM or 3% over plan.

Expenses for the month of December is $2.70MM vs plan of $3.14MM, approximately $433K or 14% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and outside contract services.

New program offers financial support for projects by individual Wikimedians[edit]

The Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program launched on January 15. While most WMF grants have so far gone to organizations like chapters, the new program will finance initiatives by individual Wikimedians or small teams to improve Wikimedia projects. The first application period lasts until February 15. During the first two weeks, 31 ideas, drafts, and proposals were submitted. An "IdeaLab" has been set up where draft proposals can be discussed, and applicants can get help to turn their ideas into complete proposals.

On January 22, Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia sites were migrated to the Foundation's new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia (US). The prior data center in Tampa, Florida had been the main hosting site since 2004; it will remain on standby to take over in case the new data center experiences an outage. The switch worked nearly without any problems. The Operations Team attributes this success to the careful preparation since 2011. This involved reviewing, improving and documenting the configuration of the servers (currently about 885) in a way that has already improved stability in 2012, and will make it possible to set up new data centers much faster.

New partnership grows the reach of Wikipedia Zero to 330 million mobile users[edit]

VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, joined the Wikipedia Zero program in January, raising the number of mobile users who are eligible to access Wikipedia without data fees by 100 million, to 330 million worldwide. Among the countries serves by VimpelCom are Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and other countries of the former USSR.

In January, the VisualEditor team worked primarily on reviewing and cleaning up the code that was enabled on the English Wikipedia in December. They spent time with their colleagues in the Parsoid team planning the next phase of development, which aims to make the VisualEditor the default editor for all Wikipedias from July 2013. The alpha version on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia was updated twice, fixing a number of bugs reported by the community and making some adjustments based on feedback.

The Parsoid team (who are creating the parsing program that translates plain wikitext into HTML annotated for easy editing, and vice-versa) also cleaned up their code and fixed bugs. Parsoid's features were overhauled to be more robust and extend support for wikis in various configurations (including in languages other than English). The team also discussed the longer-term strategy in the Parsoid roadmap, in which they decided to focus their efforts on performance improvements and HTML storage for the existing implementation, instead of the performance-oriented C++ version of Parsoid.

This month, the Editor engagement team stepped up development on the Notifications project Echo, and updated the first experimental release on mediawiki.org. The user experience for core features was improved (such as the badge, fly-out, all-notifications page and email notifications) and development started on new features, like preferences. The team completed work on HTML emails and started development of a more robust job queue. A first release on the English Wikipedia is expected by the end of March; in the meantime, users can try the current version on mediawiki.org.

Flow, a feed-like interface to enable users to better interact with their projects, entered the product design phase in early January. It has several "modules", one of which is a design for a structured user-to-user communication system. User research began in order to learn how user-to-user talk pages are handled, and how to improve them. Engineering discussions started about potential back-end and performance difficulties, the possible use of Wikidata's ContentHandler, and the evaluation of Wikia's MessageWall. A consultation with the community is planned for February, with experienced and newer users alike.

Regarding Article Feedback v5 (a quality assessment feature), its code was cleaned up in January, and new features (simpler moderation tools and better filters) were developed. An internal feedback evaluation study suggests that about 39% of the feedback collected can be used to improve articles. Discussions happened on the English and French Wikipedia regarding the future use of the tool, and the German pilot program is expected to continue until May.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team ("E3") launchedguided tours on the English Wikipedia, a feature allowing developers and Wikimedians to build tours to guide newer users. The team also tested the Getting Started landing page and task list, measuring the effect it had on driving new contributions. Analysis showed that the onboarding experience is leading to small but statistically significant increases in new English Wikipedians attempting to edit, as well as saving their first edit. In addition to measuring the effects of the guided tour associated with this project, immediate plans are to redesign the landing page and add additional task types, to entice more new contributors. Work also continued on refining the reliability and precision of the data collected from the EventLogging extension. In particular, it was migrated to a dedicated database, and the team began collecting data to measure, for example, account creations on desktop and mobile.

After its soft launch in December, GeoData was officially announced this month; this functionality, which attaches geo-coordinates to articles, will be particularly useful for the mobile "Nearby" feature (enabled on an experimental version of the site), to help contributors identify articles in need of photos not far from their location.

This month, the mobile web team also finished work on the watchlist feature, and focused their efforts on photo uploads by first adding basic uploading functionality: uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. A workflow was put in place to allow users to add a thumbnail of an image they just uploaded to the appropriate article on their local Wikipedia or sister project. These features are currently live on the Beta mobile site and are set to be released to the full mobile site in February.

Uploading photos was also the focus of the newly created "Apps team", who started to develop iOS and Android versions of an app to upload photos to Commons. The two basic apps can already upload, share and show the user's contributions.

The Thank You email to donors included a link to the 'The Impact of Wikipedia' video ) on Youtube, which features Wikipedia editors from around the world, and a clip from Michael Kleiman about how Wikipedia has impacted a small village in Peru, taken from his upcoming documentary 'Web'. Public responses to the videos on YouTube have been almost entirely positive. Here is one example: “Your videos are amazing. Thank you for sending them out. I have given donations in the past because I appreciate Wikipedia. Now, I have a much stronger commitment to support you. Thank you for giving us a fuller picture of the worldwide impact of knowledge made available through WIkipedia.”

The fundraising team prepared banners, translations, and donation pages to begin 2013 testing in various languages and countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign.

Reconciliation: The Fundraising and Finance teams are creating tools and establishing best practices for funds reconciliation.

The donor services team pulled reporting numbers on top payment method requests and major issues from the fundraiser. Disseminated this information to the rest of team to set 2013 implementation priorities.

Donor messaging: The team spent time collaboratively editing, revising, and translating new donor messages based on feedback from the 2012 fundraiser. The goal is to give donors all the information they need to make easy, successful online donations.

Launch of the Individual Engagement Grants program, which support Wikimedians to complete projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement, lead to online impact, or otherwise serve our mission, community, and strategic priorities.

The FDC proposal form was reviewed and minor edits were made to make it more user-friendly for applicants and the FDC. These suggested edits came largely from the FDC members, entities, and FDC staff. All are welcome to continue to make suggestions about the proposal form on the Talk page.

In anticipation of the second round of funding, the FDC proposal creation tool has now been launched on the FDC portal. Eligibile entities must close their eligibility gaps by Feb 15 2013 in order to apply for Round 2 FDC grants. Please contact the FDC support team with any questions or comments.

Senior Program Officer Katy Love joined the Wikimedia Foundation staff last month. Katy's role, specified in the framework, is to facilitate the FDC process from start to finish, ensuring a smooth and effective process. Feel free to reach out to Katy on her talk page.

Improvements to the Grants:Index include more detailed pages describing WMF Grants Program policies and procedures and improved templates to track the status of submissions and reports. The status of submissions and reports may also be viewed at Grants:Table.

Policy change: Grant reports will now be due within 60 days of the project completion date listed on the approved grant submission (this will apply to grants with agreements signed after 31 January 2013).

The Wikimedia Foundation has funded a meetup and seminar with the the Arts Council Norway, organized by Wikimedia Norge, where winners of Wiki Loves Monuments, the worlds largest photo contest, were celebrated. Wikimedia Norge's collaboration with the Arts Council has produced over 35 editing events with more than 600 participants.

This new program launched on January 15 with a request for grant proposals and volunteer committee members to help select the first round of grantees. We also launched an IdeaLab to offer help to potential grantees in turning ideas into complete proposals. In the first 2 weeks of what will be a month-long RfP, 31 ideas, drafts, and proposals have been submitted. 15 candidates have signed up for the committee. (see also general "Highlights" section)

We've launched a search for a Conference Coordinator to act as point of contact for WMF in supporting the Wikimania teams each year.

Launch of the Wikimania Scholarships Program: These are full scholarships for anyone to attend Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. See the Wikimania Scholarships page and encourage quality volunteers to apply!

A new project proposal on Geo-targeted Editors Participation was posted on English Wikipedia. The new project proposal aims at experimenting with new ways to increase participation of editors on English Wikipedia from underrepresented geographies where the most likely contribution language for editors is English.

WMF and Wikimedia Brasil promoted activities in Campus Party 2013, an event held in São Paulo, with the participation of 7 volunteers and 2 WMF staff members. Two lectures have been presented (one by Mateus Nobre, volunteer from Mossoró (RN) and one by Everton Alvarenga, coordinator of the Education Program). Additionally, WMF had the opportunity to contact possible future partners at this event, such as the Mozilla Foundation which will launch the new Firefox OS in Brazil including the Wikipedia app by default. Read more about the Campus Party activities.

Organization of the Wiki Meet-up at Digitalia, a digital culture event in Salvador (Bahia). Digitalia brings together academians, artists and activists to debate and propose projects and research on digital culture. The event, organized with the support of the Wikimedia Brasil Community, had 25 attendees on Wikimedia Workshops and 8 new Wikipedia accounts created as one of its results. More details will be included in the February report. Wiki Meet up in Salvador

Launched a new partnership with VimpelCom to provide Wikipedia Zero to at least 100 million additional customers this year (WMF press release)

In January, the Wikimedia Foundation was awarded a grant in the Knight News Challenge for our work in expanding Wikimedia mobile projects. Part of this grant ($600,000 for two years) will be used for Wikipedia Zero and the SMS/USSD projects to improve access to knowledge in the developing world. Press releases: WMF, Knight Foundation

On other mobile platforms, we've begun to explore ways to reduce the memory and processor requirements of our J2ME app, to increase the number of phones that can use this application; we are also finishing work on capturing the metrics from the SMS server to learn usage numbers and determine how many sessions are completed.

The Wikimedia Foundation blog published a profile of Iara Camargo, a professor of design in Brazil who participated in the Wikipedia Education Program last term. She joined students in her Editorial Design course in improving articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia about subjects such as designers, design concepts, and publishing houses. Iara wrote an article on book design as part of her work with her students. Learn more about her experiences by reading the post.

Brazil program organizes Campus Party activities

Mateus Nobre presents at Campus Party in Brazil.

Wikimedia Brasil together with the Wikimedia Foundation organized activities supporting the use of Wikipedia in education in Brazil through Campus Party. Mateus Nobre, a Wikimedia Brasil volunteer, talked about Wikipedia and Free Culture, giving a general panorama on the history of encyclopedias, from the medieval to the information age, where we have Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement. The coordinator of the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, Everton Zanella Alvarenga, also talked about Wikipedia and the Future of Education. Learn more about the Campus Party activities.

U.S., Canada Thematic Organization proposed

A group of Wikipedia Ambassadors and program instructors known as the Working Group have developed a plan for supporting the Wikipedia Education Program in the U.S. and Canada starting in Summer 2013. The group is in the process of applying for Thematic Organization approval through the Affiliations Committee. All current instructors and Ambassadors are encouraged to stay up-to-date on the next few months' progress. If you plan to continue using Wikipedia in the classroom in the U.S. and Canada and would like to become a member of the new organization, please sign up on the interest list linked from the proposal! To read more about the current plans, see the current proposal and feel encouraged to provide and feedback or ask questions on the talk page.

Welcome (back), Rod Dunican!

Rod Dunican

Rod Dunican re-joined with Wikimedia Foundation family last month as the director of the Wikipedia Education Program. Frank Schulenburg, the former director, had been promoted to Senior Director of Programs in December 2012. Rod was previously the project manager for the Public Policy Initiative, the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States, so he is extremely familiar with the program and the Wikimedia projects. In his new role, Rod is responsible for building systems that enable quality at scale in different educational environments. Leave a welcome note for Rod on his talk page.

WMF managers have been conducting their mid-year employee reviews. HR has been supporting Finance and Administration in preparing staffing baselines for the WMF annual planning process, and facilitating a senior management team 2-day meeting to kick-off the annual planning process. The purpose of the meeting was to coordinate and build alignment on priorities and interdependencies, so that we work with better assumptions as we move into the annual planning process. HR also staffed up our recruiting function.

The Wikimedia Foundation has begun its Annual Planning process. We now have a master calendar which will result in Board review and approval of the annual plan by June 29 and be released to the community on July 1.

January was a busy month for WMF Communications. The follow-up coverage of the annual campaign, four major announcements (including the launch of Wikivoyage), and media stories kept the team and communications contacts around the globe active. January saw our first public promotion of the Wikimedia Shop as well, which resulted in close to 500 orders over two days with English-project messages encouraging users to celebrate Wikipedia day with WP fan gear.

Aaron Halfaker’s University of Minnesota study of declining participation on Wikipedia gained considerable coverage in early January, owing largely to a high-profile AFP wire story that carried the story to dozens of outlets. Mostly negative/neutral tone stories repeated the main findings in Halfaker’s study, few of which outlined the Foundation’s ongoing work to tackle editor decline.

Considerable media coverage in January of the successful launch of a new Wikimedia project, Wikivoyage. Mostly positive tone coverage discussed how the project came into being, and speculated on the opportunities for the new, non-commercial platform.

‘’Fictional article on Bicholim Conflict makes global headlines’’ early January

Global media spent time highlighting the story of a high profile Wikipedia hoax, the long-standing but fictional article about an alleged Portugal/India war, ‘Bicholim Conflict’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bicholim_conflict). The majority of coverage repeated the details from other mainstream media stories, with some critical stories attacking the credibility of Wikipedia and its editor community.

The sad news of the passing of Aaron Swartz dominated headlines throughout the US and around the world through late January. An active Wikipedian and proud defender of free culture, Aaron’s legacy and impact on our projects was well known amongst Wikimedians. Media coverage frequently cited his involvement with the project.

Forty-five blog posts in January - an active month, with posts reflecting a high degree of news and announcement activity as well. Through January 2013 the Communications team and other WMF staff conducted the first-ever WM blog survey. With around 200 respondents we gathered first-time input from our readers on views and perceptions of the blog. A final top-line review will be posted later in February, but we're now aware that roughly 60% of readers are Wikimedia editors, and lots of readers arrive via the Planet Wikimedia aggregator or other RSS feeds.